


Corinthians at war

by kittu9



Category: Naruto
Genre: Dark, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Gender Issues, Infertility, Marriage, Other, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-01
Updated: 2011-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 22:33:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/kittu9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paul states in his letter to the Corinthians that without love, actions (and the lives lived in conjunction with those actions) are meaningless.</p><p>Sasuke and Sakura get married, and start a family. It’s never that easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Corinthians at war

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2006, with a few changes made for this re-post. This ventures into a fairly dark, alternate future for the kids—my head canon is not a happy canon—and you can bet that I will revisit it.

_And if I have not love, I am nothing._

Less than a year into their marriage, Sakura discovers she cannot conceive. Being who she is—she’s not about to give up  _now_ —and knowing what she knows, she doesn’t tell her husband and she enrolls herself in an experimental fertility trial. Sasuke pretends not to notice his wife’s daily injections, the way the two of them now copulate on a bizarre and exacting schedule, and he watches impassively as Sakura fights tooth and nail to keep the eventual fetus inside her body for something like long enough. She refuses to tolerate failure from her reproductive organs; she forces drugs and chakra through a system that’s already a little battered by years of birth control and inconsistent nutrition. Like every woman in the medical corps, she’s been subverting her body for years. The new drugs are nothing new. 

Sakura completes the hormone therapy three times in four years and is exhausted. Still, she does not give up and she does not say a word. Her daughters and son never realize that it is unnatural for a mother to infuse herself with blood substitute while she reads at bedtime. 

At the end of the fifth year she looks at Sasuke and tells him, quietly, that she can manage this one more time.

“I can’t give you anything else,” she tells him, and it is painful for her to admit it. Sakura has fought hard every day of her life for this, to be with Sasuke, to bear Sasuke’s children, to restore Sasuke’s clan (somewhere in there, a little part of her old self has vanished). The best that she can manage is four children (and maybe not even that fourth one—she feels sick at the thought, has continued to hemorrhage even when nursing. It’s a struggle to maintain enough weight to force her self through each trimester).

Sasuke nods—the two of them rarely speak aloud but make themselves abundantly clear regardless: it is as equal an arrangement as either one of them is likely to get.

Still, despite the silence that has grown parasitically between them, Sasuke responds with a degree of tenderness. That night their movements are precise but unscientific, as if, at last, they have become lovers. They aren’t yet thirty years old.

After thirty-three weeks—a landmark, a moment of triumph! The time is excruciating and still, just enough: after month five, Sakura orders her physician to stitch her cervix shut, condemning herself to more bed rest than she can really cope with—Sakura gives birth to her fourth child. The labor is comparatively short (two hours, seven minutes) and directly afterwards she is placed under sedation (Sakura has taken a keen pride in medication-free delivery, partially because it allows her time to argue herself out of surgeries that are unavoidable). The doctors make the decision to perform a hysterectomy. If Sasuke is in the village during this time, he is nowhere near the hospital, and no one thinks to send for him. 

Sakura wakes up hours later in Recovery as her son noses greedily at her breast. She knows instinctively that she has lost more than time.

 _Without my body,_  Sakura wonders,  _what have I got left?_  (Her love is tenacious, given through clenched teeth, garnished with sacrifice, and she regards it as largely inconsequential—it’s too much like breathing to register to her as anything but involuntary, essential.) 

She permits no visitors and a week later she and her son go home.

Her husband reads her expression and Sasuke is still a man, beneath his curse and his history and all that blood, and Sakura has been his wife for nearly seven years. He puts the older children to bed a full hour early and when he and Sakura are alone in their room, the aftershocks of these years, the lives of their children, resound between them. Sakura can feel, like an unspoken hollowness, the ache of the miscarriages she never mentioned compounding with the raw cavity the surgery has made of her body.

She nurses their son—Sasuke watches as his youngest child takes the breast (it was a worry that he would not have developed enough to have a sucking reflex; the baby is still very small). All of their children have dark hair.

When finished, Sakura puts to baby to bed. Without the infant in her arms, she looks defeated, without armor, lost. 

Sasuke reaches out and finds her; he realizes with a start that this life, here, what she has given him—it was always more than enough.


End file.
